One of the earliest prospects for the application of CMC in professional and academic work was its promise for the support of virtual groups, that is, small groups of people collaborating on projects using CMC to interact with one another (Johansen, Vallee, & Spangler, 1979). There is no question that working in groups—even traditional, FtF groups—presents numerous challenges and frustrations. Yet some facets of working in short-term computer-mediated groups seem to encourage certain judgmental biases when members encounter problems and group performance is suboptimal.
The attributions that individual people make for themselves, that is, the way they explain to themselves the way they acted with respect to their group
interaction is subject to self-serving biases. In virtual groups there seems to be a tendency to scapegoat one’s distant, unfamiliar partners, even when it is oneself who did not participate fully or completely. These erroneous attributions lead to animosity and tension, as well as poor productivity.
Beyond the immediate effects of these errors, researchers believe, this pattern of blaming blinds individuals to their own shortcomings as virtual group members, which inhibits their prospects for individual improvement in such groups. This creates self-fulfilling cycles of blame and a worsening of performance further down the road. The next section of this chapter reviews the applications and typical misfortunes of geographically distributed virtual groups, from an attribution perspective. We also present some remedies which research has demonstrated help to alleviate these destructive cycles.
In business, there are numerous estimates that a majority of collaborative groups work online. Virtual groups save travel expenses. They allow collaborators to discuss projects opportunistically, asynchronously (i.e., using email or group communication systems that do not involve real-time discussion), when their own schedules and openings allow them to, rather than having to schedule meetings that suit a number of individuals’ schedules (see for review Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). Virtual groups can support trans-continental or international collaborations that take advantage of different regional requirements or information resources. In online education, too, virtual groups have become a popular alternative to classroom teaching.
Collaborative group projects among students are often said to be better than learning course material from textbooks and live or video-recorded lectures alone. In contrast to groups who experience the attribution problems described above, under the right circumstances virtual student groups have the capacity to generate more productivity, and more affectionate inter-member relations, than do FtF groups (see, e.g., Walther, 1997). Several studies of long-term groups, with several projects, depict more successful and harmonious relations than in short-term groups (see for review Walther, 2008).
Research has attempted to compare long-term and short-term groups for clues about the causes of the different outcomes they achieve. One explanation suggests that virtual groups require a number of adaptations to the nature and flow of CMC in order to operate successfully. For instance, because CMC messages tend to occur more infrequently than FtF con-versational utterances, the exchange of information in virtual groups takes place more slowly than in parallel offline settings. Therefore, virtual groups need to start their collaborations sooner, and exchange messages much more frequently, than FtF groups may do (Walther & Bunz, 2005). Virtual groups need to be explicit in their messages, with regard both to their expected work pace (so there are no surprising gaps) and in their discussions of one another’s contributions since there is no head-shaking or frowning to give
feedback more subtly. Virtual groups, like FtF groups, benefit from setting, and meeting, interim deadlines. In virtual groups, meeting interim dead-lines is crucial for signaling reliability, whereas a failure to meet deaddead-lines makes partners quite nervous. Long-term virtual groups tend to make these adjustments. Even short-term groups that meet these “rules of virtual groups” exhibit greater trust and believe their work is better; outside evaluators also rate work better by groups who follow these rules more rather than less.
However, when the rules of virtual groups are not followed—that is, when groups do not adapt to the medium and they do an inferior job—dark sides emerge. Not only do their trust levels and work quality decline, they also experience problematic attribution patterns (Cramton, 2001). Attribution refers to the manner in which people come to ascribe what the cause was for another person’s behavior. Attributions are interesting because people often make them in ways that reflect unconscious, self-serving biases and pre-judices. Generally speaking, attribution research (e.g., Ross, 1977) finds that we tend to blame others for negative events and to credit ourselves (or people we like or feel similar to) for positive events (for a recent review and alternative, see Bazarova & Walther, 2009; Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2007).
These patterns are said to occur whether or not they are correct. They protect individuals’ egos from self-blame.
It follows, then, that when an individual has contributed a poor performance in a virtual group, it would be distressing to blame oneself for one’s misbehavior. Virtual groups provide an easy escape from this type of self-recrimination, however. In the situation where one has never seen and does not know remote partners well, remote partners become the scapegoat for an individual’s own problems (Walther & Bazarova, 2007). From an attribution perspective, this is the manifestation of people’s self-serving attribution bias. In order to protect our self-esteem, we are more likely to make situational attributions for our own bad deeds (blaming some external factor) than we are to make dispositional attributions (blame our own personal characteristics). When we operate in social interactions with others, as we do in a group, the other members become potential external factors that may take the blame for our own misdeeds (Robins, Mendelsohn, &
Spranca, 1996). And when the group is virtual, where remote partners are unseen and ephemeral, members are easy targets who can be blamed for the poor performances that an individual may have committed. Indeed, in virtual groups with all members residing in different cities across the United States, virtual group members blamed a partner for the worst thing they themselves admitted to doing in the group significantly more frequently than groups whose members all resided in the same place. Collocated group members more frequently blamed themselves instead (Walther &
Bazarova, 2007).
We have witnessed cases in which the false attributions that virtual group members expressed for other partners’ behavior led to demoralization and resentment. They make it personal, while also denouncing “those people”
from whatever location, institution, or other country they may represent (Walther, Boos, & Jonas, 2002). One can see why researchers fear that false attributions inhibit learning and improving as an individual virtual group worker: If the group’s or individual’s failings are attributed to others, and
faulty processes are blamed on others, the individual agent has no motivation to examine his or her own behavior, behavior which may itself have failed to accommodate virtual communication’s requisites. Without recognizing that one’s self may be to blame, there can be no introspection and no learning. This is to say that the failures to adapt to virtual group communication can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of skepticism and commensurate poor performance in virtual group arrangements.
(Walther, 2008, p. 280)
Thus, it is not CMC per se that creates problematic blame patterns in online groups, but the way that CMC allows people to work with others who they do not know and do not see, who can then become easy targets for blame in a way that FtF interaction does not promote. Just as attribution theory helps us understand how things go wrong in virtual groups, attri-bution theory has guided some interventions that allow facilitators to help virtual groups go right.
Research by Walther et al. (2002) investigated whether attributions of responsibility can be redirected away from one’s partners and back to the self—to get individuals to recognize their own contributions to poor performance in a virtual group—and whether, once sensitized to one’s own mistakes, individuals would learn, refrain from blaming others, and work harder themselves. Their premise was that, when a virtual group contains no unknown partners on which to scapegoat the poor performance of an individual, members must focus their attention on their own behaviors that did not contribute to the group’s adaptation. The researchers compiled student teams of different kinds in three waves of projects, who met in online groups to complete short research papers. The students were members of a course that met at a university in the United States or one in Germany. In the first wave, unlike the typical virtual group, groups were composed entirely of students from the same university as one another. Even though they saw each other in class every other day, they were restricted to a Web-based com-munication system for their two-week group projects. When they finished, assessments reflected that they did not adapt well at all to the requirements of online collaboration, discussed above; they did not adhere to the rules of virtual groups. They procrastinated, and communicated infrequently; they exhibited frustration, and performed poorly on their projects. However,
because the groups were composed of people that members knew, there was no remote scapegoat on whom to blame poor performance. Group members reflected on their adaptation problems, which they appeared to recognize, and many expressed an inclination to approach things differently next time.
Subsequent waves of group projects involved members from both Germany and the United States working together online. These groups performed well, used time effectively, and communicated frequently. They enjoyed their projects and many made friends among their remote colleagues.
Questionnaires indicated high scores on affection and liking, impression development, project effort, and even on measures of perceived physical attractiveness related to their virtual partners. It appears that training virtual group members to focus attributions on themselves, rather than on virtual scapegoats, has the potential to lighten the otherwise dark dimensions of online collaboration.
CONCLUSION
This review has focused on three foci where aspects of Internet com-munication can lead to negative outcomes, not always, but sometimes. These three foci—problematic online social interaction, harmful virtual community support, and misattributions in virtual groups—are hallmark cases in the dark side of relationships. First, each of them takes place in settings where technology is associated with prosocial benefits more generally, but in some cases turn out with dire consequences. Second, they occur due to subtle twists or redirections of the very same communicative and cognitive means that allow the technology platforms to achieve prosocial ends. Third, each of them has at its core a fundamental relational component: Because individuals who have difficulty with relationships offline find greater reward creating them online, they use the Internet as their primary relational conduit, to their own continuing offline demise; because virtual community members find solidarity and trust among those with like minds and experiences which they may not as easily do among their offline neighbors, friends, and families, they support one another’s self-harm or paranoid hatred of others in online support groups and discussion lists; and when virtual groups contain members from afar whom others do not see or know, they blame those remote miscreants for their own poor performances, causing unwarranted antagonism and harming the group’s potential even further. In all of these contexts, communication via the Internet often leads to happy endings but, for reasons we have identified above, the same processes can lead to negativity as well.
There are surely many other problems that have been associated with Internet communication. In our view, however, there is less research or less
robust research on most such phenomena that allow us to understand their pervasiveness or what specific role the Internet plays in them. Here are a few examples. First, sensationalistic media reports often raise concerns about the seduction of children through chatroom encounters, leading to runaways and sometimes to encounters with pedophiles. One could approach this concern through discussion of the hyperpersonal communication process, which we have alluded to in the case of POSI, above, to speculate on how individuals form intense, trusting relations online, even with strangers, and how selective self-presentation allows abductors to make themselves appear so benevolent and appealing. Although such cases are no doubt serious, it is not clear how extensive this kind of problem actually is (see Walsh & Wolak, 2005; Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell, & Ybarra, 2008). Our chief concern, though, is that these kinds of events probably take place more frequently offline than they do online. Without information to the contrary, it would be inappropriate to identify properties of Internet communication that cause them.
Similarly, there is long-standing concern that it is easier to lie about oneself via the Internet than FtF. Sensationalistic cases of identity fraud keep this topic in the public eye (e.g., Van Gelder, 1985), some of which ended in murder (Laby, 2007) or suicide (Steinhauer, 2008). Although the Internet helped in perpetrating these frauds, the Internet’s unique role in them is unclear. As unusual and regrettable as they are, they are not the first times that individuals have pretended to be the gender they are not, murdered someone over jealousy, or committed suicide over rejection. What might be the Internet’s role in deception? A popular explanation suggests that without nonverbal cues to contradict bogus claims, it is more difficult to tell if someone we encounter online is not something he or she claims to be or is deviating from accurate self-presentations (e.g., Hollingshead, 2000). Also, many suspect that without the nonverbal cues that are believed to accompany deceptive communication—stereotypical behaviors such as averting mutual gaze, or exhibiting nervous movements—that other kinds of lies are likely to go undetected when they are committed online. Research has found, however, that online deceivers, rather than detectors, are the ones who are hampered by not being able to see their partners’ nonverbal cues—cues to suspicion, not deception—when deception focuses on attitudes and behaviors rather than identities (Burgoon, Stoner, Bonito, & Dunbar, 2003;
Woodworth, Hancock, & Goorha, 2005). Although much systematic research is beginning to accumulate on the topic of misleading identity presenta-tions—for instance, that people who build online dating profiles distort their actual weight or height in their postings (Toma, Hancock, & Ellison, 2008;
see Chapter 5, this volume)—much of that research has not included FtF comparison conditions, and as such it is impossible to know whether online date-seekers lie more than offline date-seekers. There is no reliable evidence
that people misrepresent themselves online more than they do FtF, and we find it hard to believe that many people do not misrepresent aspects of themselves in flirtations and short-term courtships, no matter what medium they are using. Research that lays the blame for deceit on Internet com-munication risks ignoring substantial research showing (1) that people are generally poor deception detectors FtF (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), and that (2) the most reliable cues to deception are those which are transmitted verbally, not nonverbally (Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison, & Ferrara, 2002).
More credible research is beginning to develop with respect to cyber-stalking. Cyberstalking refers to a complex of behaviors performed by an individual over time that inflict unwanted communication and intrusions on another individual, according to research by Spitzberg and Hoobler (2002).
These behaviors include sending unwanted emails, at minimum, to efforts to steal the identity and ruin the reputation of the target individual, at more sinister levels. Spitzberg and Hoobler’s review of the emerging literature suggests that many individuals who engage in cyberstalking are likely to possess various psychological illnesses such as borderline personality disorder (see also Sheridan & Grant, 2007). If this is so, it is similar to the view of Internet addiction that suggests that the Internet may not be addictive per se, but individuals who are prone to other problems use the Internet to manifest them. Regardless of its cause, cyberstalking appears to manifest several dimensions, including the more common hyperintimacy (sending exaggerated messages of affection, need, disclosure, and/or harassment), and the less common invasion or intrusion (sabotaging reputation, exposing private information, and surveillance). Despite the potential of the Internet to allow cyberstalkers to hide themselves and avoid physical confrontations with victims, cyberstalking appears to occasion physical stalking as well.
Future research may endeavor to learn whether the Internet merely facilitates new forms of what is called “obsessive relational intrusion,” or whether our exposure to one another via CMC induces stalking of any kind for some reason.
All these topics and examples reflect that when it comes to the Internet, it is difficult to sort out when the medium plays a causal role in the darker effects that are seen. If it does, what aspects of the Internet play a part? The lack of nonverbal cues in text-based communications? The distance between communicators when they interact? The asynchronous nature of the medium that allows time to be used to make messages edited into acceptability or fester into insults? The sociometric fact that people are in direct contact with large numbers of people they do not otherwise know? The comparatively greater control one has over self-presentation and expression compared to FtF discussion? Is it the interaction of some of these factors that facilitates the good and the bad outcomes of online interaction, or is it an interaction
between these factors and the proclivities and limitations of the individuals and communities who exploit them? Understanding quite how the Internet affects communication outcomes is a complex inquiry, and learning to employ the correct aspects with the best arrangements to promote brighter rather than darker relational and communication processes provides a stimulating, substantial challenge.
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